It takes courage to grieve, and yet, equally important is the courage it takes to let go of grief.

Think about: the 35-year-old mother of three who denied herself a personal life as she grieved for 13 years after her young husband died of cancer; the woman who read her dead mother’s letters and cried every day for 27 years; the man who did not stop raging for 3 years after his son died in an accident, the person frozen with sorrow, rage and guilt over a loved one’s suicide.

Perhaps one of the best testimonials we can give to our deceased loved ones is how well we recover and live our lives after a loss, not how much and how hard we grieve.

Grief is a natural and healthy response to loss, change and disappointment. It is not to be suppressed or denied or bottled up. But, it is, also, not to be perpetuated so that we stay mired in endless grieving instead of living.

We always have a choice. Intentionally exercising that choice to let go is the most profound lesson of living.

Even if we lose people under terrible or shocking circumstances, we can recover and go on living.

What does finishing with grief entail?

Completion is literally saying “good-bye” to the one we have lost, and expressing and letting go of all the emotions, all the anguish surrounding the loss itself.

Completion of grief is NOT ending our love, forgetting our loved one, or erasing our memories, but it IS, instead, releasing ourselves from pain.

Our grief is intentionally moved from the foreground of our lives to the background. To be truly complete, we must be willing to detach ourselves from both the one we lost and from our grief.

This means disengaging ourselves from having grief be the most important aspect of our lives and from having the one we lost be the only important person to us. It is difficult to do, but this is what will give us the most relief and will allow us to begin our lives anew.

The thought that our soul or spirit is eternal gives many people enormous solace. Some feel we live on after death in our loved one’s fond memories, and that is so.

Some people talk about the life force of a person transmuting into energy after death of the body; an energy that dissipates and goes on infinitely in the cosmos. That can be a comforting thought if you visualize the eternal vitality of an individual’s soul energy coursing through the universe, and…since you consist of the same matter as the universe…then you are connected and part of that very same energy.

At some level, we remain joined – forever!

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
Read an excerpt now
TV Shows and Clips about the Death of Cindy James